It's not hard to see why he is underappreciated. His Library of Congress "Creator" page, for one thing, comes up as "Not Found".

This photo archive is a vast and in many respects also a lost resource.

Dorothea Lange lamented the fact that despite the valiant efforts of the FSA director Roy Stryker, the greatest part of these files went unseen even at the time they were made, and in later years the general ignorance of just what is in these files has been compounded.

There are something like 160,000 FSA photos, many uncatalogued or incorrectly catalogued, hidden away in various side-tunnels of the labyrinthine library archive. So the research task has involved extensive searching, sorting, as well as a fair amount of mind-reading, trying to understand what the photographers were after and what they found, so as to organize the sprawling miscellaneous files into mini-narratives (like this one) -- and then, at the end of the day, to avoid overdetermining these stories by eschewing further textual comment and trying to simply step out of the way of the thrust of living truth and natural fact.

Don, to be honest the work has been humbling. The glaring evidences of a massive social inequity, the apparent failure of compassion before a staggering superplus of human suffering, the tale told by our national history... pleasant as it would be to dismiss all this by saying, "but that was then, and it's all so different now," I don't know.

These photos are amazing, "a narrative quality that is simply devastating" as Don writes here. JOhnny and I are looking through all these now (we got through the first set of Heard County Georgia yesterday), had been watching Olivier's Hamlet the other day, with the scene at Ophelia's grave (a far cry from what we SEE HERE). . .